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How museums are becoming workout hubs

How museums are becoming workout hubs

Catch some culture while you star jump

'The Museum Workout' at The Met, NYC. Photography: Paula Lobo

Museums have good reasons for asking visitors to restrain their physical exertions. Human clumsiness can lead to expensive disasters – a few years ago a hapless guest at New York’s The Met tripped and put an arm through Picasso’s ‘The Actor’ (estimated worth $130m) while in 2006 a stray shoelace launched a man down the stairs at the Cambridge’s Fitzwilliam Museum, straight into a trio of valuable Qing Dynasty vases.

Recently however, museums have been ignoring the risks of combining art and activity, offering innovative takes on exercise classes that occur among their installations.

Those lucky enough to get a space on the now-sold-out tour are guided on their early morning journey by a pair of dancers in glittering cocktail dresses and trainers. They perform a range of heart rate raising movements including speed walking, jumping jacks and lunges.

This energised take on the art tour clearly appeals to the public. On its initial announcement, the performance sold out, and when the run was extended in February this year, all tickets were snapped up in an afternoon.

So why relocate one’s workouts to spaces more commonly associated with breathless reverence than being out of breath? And why are curators risking their priceless pieces to the threat of a clumsy yoga transition?

For Limor Tomer, general manager of MetLiveArts, The Museum Workout ‘ingeniously tweaks the age-old questions, “what is art?” and “why does art matter?” and gets at these questions by way of a rigorously physical and intellectual workout’.

It also presents previously unasked questions, no less important, such as how the experience of John Singer Sargent’s ‘Portrait of Madame X’ is altered by performing squats to a disco beat.